Google tries out picture captchas
Chances are at some point during your Web travels you’ve run across a captcha. You know, one of those things where a phrase or word are written out in what appears to be handwriting and you have to type the word that you see written into a box in order to move on in filling out a form, making a purchase, or signing up for something? The idea behind a captcha is that they make sure there is actually a real person trying to do whatever it is you’re doing rather than an automated computer system. It turns out automated computer systems have started to catch up with the traditional captcha method, so now Google has come up with a new method to keep out the computers.
Google’s new method requires users to look at pictures and determine which one is upright. Sure, the idea seems a lot more simple to the average person than that whole typing a word in a box thing- but to a computer, figuring out which way is up on a picture can be pretty difficult.
Google said about the service:
This task requires analysis of the often complex contents of an image, a task that humans usually perform well and machines generally do not.
Given a large repository of images, such as those from a web search result, we use a suite of automated orientation detectors to prune those images that can be automatically set upright easily. We then apply a social feedback mechanism to verify that the remaining images have a human-recognizable upright orientation.
The main advantages of our Captcha technique over the traditional text recognition techniques are that it is language-independent, does not require text-entry (e.g. for a mobile device), and employs another domain for Captcha generation beyond character obfuscation. This Captcha lends itself to rapid implementation and has an almost limitless supply of images.
We conducted extensive experiments to measure the viability of this technique…Our Captcha technique achieves high success rates for humans and low success rates for bots, does not require text entry, and is more enjoyable for the user than text-based Captcha.
I know that I personally often find filling out captcha forms tiresome and frustrating. I recently purchased tickets through Ticketmaster for a U2 concert in my area and had to fill out the captcha form five or six time before I actually got it correct, losing precious moment where I could have gotten better seats for the event. I for one am all about picture captcha, they would make life much easier for me. How many of you would welcome picture captchas?
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